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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

There's two effects of the protests.

There's the effect on reddit, I don't feel qualified to quantify it, but it's the smaller of the two.

There's the effect on every single competitor, it's a huge positive one.

Competitors can only grow so fast, infrastructure takes time to scale, communities take time to organize and build. The most similar reddit alternatives (kbin, lemmy, specialized forums) have been growing as quickly as they possible could under the circumstances.

There still not big enough to absorb all of reddit, but they are a lot closer than they were, because of the protest. That's a huge accomplishment, and a long term existential threat to reddit.

To say the "protest has accomplished absolutely nothing" is highly ignorant.

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> The most similar reddit alternatives (kbin, lemmy, specialized forums) have been growing as quickly as they possible could under the circumstances.

I'm a mod in a niche forum which suddenly got more popular due to Reddit's BS and trust me, it's a mess. We went from "not even I remembered to log in every month" to "multiple crashes due to excessive load".

We won't ever be a threat to Reddit, but the protest is definitely going to become a threat to my sanity...

Ok, maybe for some competitors it's a negative one, but for competitors interested in growing quickly it's a positive one.

I don't consider that space a competitor, it's just a fan-run forum for people to discuss some gaming stuff.

I still consider the growth of the forum as a net positive (because it's a cool space which has produced cool things in the past), but since it's running on spare time and money, our ability to absorb new users is limited. And won't scale really quickly, because we don't plan on making money out of it.

"Competitors can only grow so fast, infrastructure takes time to scale, communities take time to organize and build"

Are you using an IT structure from the 1990's? Are you funding it using mail in contributions?

If not the only restriction on how fast a platform can grow is entirely down to how fast it can draw attention and acceptance from the masses.

If I'm being honest here these other platforms are a significantly smaller threat to reddit than reddit is. The way the platform reward low value posts and punish any dissenting opinions in discussion threads does more damage to their brands than any wpuld be competitor.

Maybe in a world with an unlimited budget. I'm sure you're just thinking you spin up AWS with a million nodes and handle the traffic.

Not that database scaling can be an issue, or funding, or finding limits in your application.

Probably a junior dev without the required experience to really understand how hard it can be to suddenly and unexpectedly scale.

Why don't I strap on my money helmet and squeeze down into a money cannon and fire off into moneyland where money grow on moneys?

So, what has it accomplished? As I said, I am working on an article so getting all the perspectives would be great.

A lot of moderators have an over inflated ego and coupled with delusions of grandeur they think they can enact change when the reality of it is they are unpaid employees subservient to Reddit management.

When push comes to shove a majority of these moderators would rather hold onto their perceived fiefdom for some form of semblance of power and control in their life than growing a backbone, standing up for what they say they believe in and deleting their account in protest.

I think I made my point in the post you're replying to.

If you want quantified numbers I suppose you could view charts like

https://the-federation.info/platform/184 <--- Bunch of tabs at this site

https://the-federation.info/platform/73

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/graphs/commit-activity

https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/activity/daily <-- Not sure how to generate nice charts from this one

But frankly, if you need me to tell you this, you aren't remotely qualified to write that article.

I get it if you have some personal issue with Reddit, but I don't think it's fair that you're pointing a gun at me and emptying the whole clip just because I asked a question.

Would you like me to retort to saying that I am incompetent to write this article? I don't think you would like that very much.

I mod /r/Scala and created /r/CanadaUrbanism and to be honest I didn't care all that much about the API changes, but the reaction to the mod protest by Reddit Admins has motivated me to block Reddit and not visit the site anymore. Specifically, the actions they've taken to remove mods that take the subs private, restricted, or allow NSFW content. There had always been the notion that the subs are owned by the creators/mods. Obviously not in a legal sense, but that so long as mods aren't violating sitewide rules they own the board they create. With Reddit admins removing mods and replacing them with their own it for me has changed the whole dynamic where I feel like I'm just doing Reddit's work for them rather than creating something myself when I create, maintain, or contribute to a sub.

For me it's just a last straw on the camel's back. The site has obviously gone severely downhill since pivoting from the old.reddit.com desktop-based site that focused on links and discussion, akin to a forum, to what it is now, an infinite scroll of half pics and gifs, half rage-bait. There is not much interesting discussion going on on Reddit these days, the change of the UX to prioritize mobile use has changed the entire nature of the site to favour short quips and less thoughtful posts. People on this board will often say things like "oh well at least if you go to your specific niche subreddits there is still good discussion being had", but even this is much reduced. Go to any long lived historically discussion-heavy board like say /r/Coffee, /r/LetsTalkMusic, /r/TheoryOfReddit, etc. If I look in the internet archive and go back 10 years, I generally find much more interesting conversations being had back then.

Reddit coasted for a long time on goodwill from the early 2010s, even though the current site and company seem pretty poorly run and stagnant.

This latest debacle killed that goodwill for a lot of us. Why bother contributing -- through moderation, posts, or even upvotes/downvotes -- to a site that clearly doesn't value the rest of us?

On the bright side, HN has continued to host decent conversations for years running now. There are a few decent communities growing on Lemmy, Tildes, and Squabbles as well. I'm excited for the distributed future, I think the Fediverse is going to provide a lot of decent competition in terms of hosting, UI, and moderation over the next couple of years. It's much needed after almost two decades of stagnancy from Reddit.

I'm just changing all my comments to the story of Streetlamp Le Moose, it'll at least take up resource space, and provide no real value for Reddit, and is kinda the Redditor thing to do.

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